John, aka mordax or mordacius in many online spaces, was born in Texas. He moved around a lot as a boy, mostly around the West Coast. When his family finally settled in Washington, TTRPGs were a major part of finding stability and friendship. He began GMing with the D&D red box set at the YMCA, to the consternation of one employee who took Mazes & Monsters too seriously. Everybody else was supportive, and the table was always full. His first real love was Gamma World for its mix of zany retrofuturism, superpowers and total lethality. It also had talking trees and gun-toting raccoons before those somehow went mainstream.

He has gamed off and on ever since, always preferring the GM side of the table. Why be one protagonist when you could craft a whole world? He was once invited to play a villain at a LARP specifically for his evil laugh. Still, he wanted players to get to experiment too: for every time he threw them a curveball, he let them play what they wanted, including epic D&D characters or gods. A GM is meant to challenge and facilitate, rather than to undercut.

Experiments, house rules and different systems have always abounded at his table. He read things even if he couldn’t find time to run them, always looking at the underlying structure of why each set of rules were what they were. College brought some time with formal game theory, layout and playing with written fiction, too.

It’s his belief that the rules shape the story, much like water conforms to the container it’s poured into. This mix of storytelling grounded in pragmatism and structure informs all of his gaming efforts, mostly recently the AHA RPG.

You can find John at: https://linktr.ee/mordacius